Complementarity Problems in Restructured Natural Gas Markets

The restructuring of the gas industry did not so far generate the same modeling activity as in electricity. While the literature of activity in electricity market models is now abundant, it is still rather scant on the gas side. This paper surveys some of the existing models and attempts to take advantage of the wealth of knowledge available in electricity in order to develop relevant models of restructured gas markets. The presentation is in three parts. The first one gives a blueprint of the market architectures inherited from the European and North American gas legislation. It also introduces a prototype optimization model and its interpretation in terms of perfect competition between agents operating on the restructured market. The second part extends the model to the case where marketers have market power. The third part considers more complex issues related to regulation of access to the network and existence of market power with different types of agents. Equilibrium models are commonly formulated as complementarity problems and the same mathematical programming framework is adopted here. Many models are single stage, there are generally easy to formulate and well known computationally. But many phenomena require two stage models that are much more intricate and on which much less is known. The paper is thus also aimed at pinpointing possible avenues for mathematical programming research.